The Changeling

Jessica Alba discusses marriage, motherhood, and the role she hopes will reshape her career

Faced with the opportunity to spend a Saturday afternoon lolling around in bed with Jessica Alba, most twentysomething males would be more interested in coaxing the babe out of the dress than getting her into it. But to Jason Wu—one of five soon-to-be It Designers who cozied up to Alba on ELLE's photo shoot—any woman who looks this good in a challenging hue he calls "Skittles yellow" is worth rhapsodizing about. "She's got perfect features. Prettier in real life than on billboards," Wu gasps, then pauses. "Wait. Didn't she just have a baby?"

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Take that, blogosphere! At the very moment Wu is speaking, the gossip hounds who made Alba Yahoo!'s fourth most searched person of 2008 (below Britney and Barack, above Lindsay and Angelina) are squawking about a retro-glam calendar she shot for the Italian liquor label Campari. Airbrushed! Photoshopped! No one looks like that in real life!

The haters—and, strangely, Alba does seem to provoke a particularly virulent strain of jealous venom—should see the woman posing on Wu's shoulder. In that alien-life-form, only-in-Hollywood way, Alba got that figure back less than three months after giving birth to daughter Honor Marie in June. To make matters worse, she may be bodily gifted in more ways than one. "Contractions aren't that bad," she declares. "If you've ever had bad cramps? That's what they're like. But that moment when they put the baby on your chest—that's deep. It's a deep experience."

At Alba's last ELLE shoot, for the February 2008 cover, she had just reunited with her producer boyfriend, Cash Warren (after their bad breakup), and was hiding a surprise pregnancy. One year later, she's a wife and mother. (And, it turns out, still keeping secrets: this time, the party she and Warren would throw two weeks after this interview, officially celebrating their eight-month-old marriage.) That would be a fast-forward for anyone; it's an especially significant priority shift for someone who became a card-carrying SAG member at the age of 12 (for the kiddie comedy Camp Nowhere).

By the time she landed the role of a genetically enhanced underworld avenger on the TV show Dark Angel at 14, the lithe, doe-eyed child actor had become a teen sex symbol in leather pants—an image that has rankled Alba ever since. Still, her next few films did little to reverse it. She played a bleached-blond scientist in navy neoprene—endowed, ironically, with the superpower of invisibility— in both Fantastic Four movies and a hip bone–shimmying dancer who teaches Missy Elliot moves in Honey. Then there was Sin City's stripper with a heart of gold (in fringed chaps and a push-up bra). When none of these shook off her pretty-girl shackles, Alba dove into comedy, first opposite an extra-grating Dane Cook in Good Luck Chuck and then in last year's The Love Guru, a Deepak Chopra spoof that could have been Mike Myers' next Austin Powers but, well, wasn't—both movies might have been funnier if they had actually allowed their leading lady to crack a joke once in a while.

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Carter Smith; styled by Joe Zee

And so, 15 years into a successful career, Alba's looks are still hogging the spotlight. Rapturous fans idolize her pillowy lips, her gleaming skin—hell, even her nose was ranked by L.A. plastic surgeons as the most requested model of 2007.

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It stands to reason, then, that the film that finally obscures those heavenly features is the one of which she's most proud. The upcoming indie An Invisible Sign of My Own employs the Halle-Nicole-Charlize highlight-talent-by-burying-looks strategy, but instead of adding a prosthetic nose or 35 extra pounds, Alba is shrouded in a mousy amalgam of pigtails, floppy hats, and schlumpy layers to achieve a look the actress calls "grandma meets 10-year-old."

Alba plays Mona Gray, a naive, reclusive woman whose obsession with numbers leads her to take a job as a math teacher; the film follows Mona as she breaks out of her childlike shell and learns to embrace the outside world. The role is, by all accounts, a more demanding, complex journey than any Alba has ever embodied on-screen.

"I really did not picture her as the lead in this film," says director Marilyn Agrelo, who is best known for the culty child-performer documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. "I knew her as a piece of pop culture, Fantastic Four, this sort of thing." In a single meeting, Alba won Agrelo over. "I was so surprised by her intelligence, her thoughtfulness, her poise," Agrelo says. "She's a real, flesh-and-blood, fully realized woman."

Costar Chris Messina (the preppy fiancé from Vicky Cristina Barcelona), who plays a science teacher who becomes Mona's love interest, describes Alba's work in the film as "magnificent." "Jessica's a beautiful woman, so this business is going to want to put her in a bikini or put a gun in her hand, but she's just more than that," Messina says. "It seemed to me that she really seized this."

Carter Smith; styled by Joe Zee

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The result, according to Agrelo, is a performance that could change the course of Alba's career. "I remember when Pulp Fiction opened, and people kind of laughed at the idea of John Travolta in that role. He blew everybody away," she says. "When things like that happen, it's wonderful. And it's so rare that you get to be the one who pulls the surprise out of the hat."

Messina refers to the actress-mom-wife "Jessica" and pop culture property "Jessica Alba," as if they were totally unrelated entities. The woman who shows up to brunch the morning after our shoot is a bit of both. She arrives early, dressed in Olsen-sister incognito (boyfriend jeans, mannish brogues, fingerless gloves), at the chaotic TriBeCa comfort food spot Bubby's. It's the kind of place where, on weekends at least, lines are nightmarish, children outnumber adults, and the surrounding sidewalk is a veritable Bugaboo parking lot—and that's exactly what Alba likes about it. ("There aren't that many places where you don't have to feel bad when your kid has a meltdown," she says. "Plus, there's a changing table downstairs.") Today, Jessica is friendly and warm, but make no mistake, Jessica Alba—the guarded professional who works hard to defend the boundaries between personal and private—is in the driver's seat.

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ELLE: You agreed to the concept for our shoot without ever seeing any of the designers' clothes before. That's pretty brave.

JA: I'm all about supporting anyone whose art is also the way they make their living. I was always a slave to the commerce end of [acting]—I needed to survive, make a living, get some grounding in the business. These guys probably aren't making any money now, but at least they won't be 50 and say, "Dammit, my dream was to be a designer." They're making it happen at 22.

ELLE: And they're cute.

JA: So cute! I was telling my friend last night, You must have to be beautiful, very, very thin, ultracool, and very young to be a new designer these days.

ELLE: Sounds like being an actress.

JA: Not really, no.

ELLE: You don't think being beautiful and thin has helped you?

JA: You have to be the best of whatever you are, but successful, cool actresses come in all shapes and sizes.

ELLE: True, but it's hard to name an A-lister who's not sample-size.

JA: It's interesting that A-list also means commercially viable, versus being Frances McDormand, who's amazing and A-list to me but doesn't sell as many tickets.

ELLE: And doesn't headline movies.

JA: She'll probably have a more fulfilling career and a more fulfilling life, and maybe doesn't need to make $20 million to be okay.

ELLE: Still, you snapped back into shape pretty fast after giving birth.

JA: I did it for the Campari job. [The workouts] were horrible. I cried. And I haven't worked out since.

ELLE: Did you have to do anything besides exercise?

JA: I wore a girdle. Eight weeks after my girlfriend had her baby, you could see her six-pack. She told me to put an elastic band around my waist—any kind of band or girdle works. She was like, "I slept in it." I didn't recover as fast as she did. I don't have a sixpack—that's just not my body at all.

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ELLE: Please. I've seen Sin City. Twice.

JA: I'm not completely back to where I was. It's not the same, but it's not that serious. I'd rather spend an evening with my baby and give her a bath and read her stories and watch her roll around than go work out in a gym.

ELLE: Are you having separation anxiety?

JA: This is the first time I've been away from her. It's been six days. It sucks; it's the worst thing ever. But we Skype, so I can see her on video. The worst is when you can see her little chubby hands grab the screen, and I'm not there. [She pauses, her eyes welling up, then laughs as she wipes the tears away.] That's a new thing—I never cried before. Just being a mother is making me a big, weepy mess.

ELLE: Honor is a great name.

ELLE: The first of many surprises.

ELLE: And seven years later, you were working.

ELLE: What's so different about An Invisible Sign of My Own?

JA: It feels like I'm starting to come into my own in terms of where I want to go artistically, toward more complicated, interesting characters. I always thought bigger movies could be a more enriching experience, and that was really stupid of me. When the budget is over a certain amount, it has to be a certain kind of movie. I always gave 100 percent, 200 percent, but it always fell short.

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